Judicator

Hmm, alright. You guys have convinced me. I've been itching to try an estoc-wielding fighter since the game was released. I might as well give it a shot. They're *ALL BASTARDS*. Each and every mob, all of them, all the time. They're all a bunch of onery little bastards who ignore your front line and go *RIGHT* for your back line. Basically engagement is meaningless and there is longer any such thing as a viable "tank". You know that whole "huge pile of a mess" that JSaw was complaining about Baldur's Gate being, that they instituted engagement to get rid of? Yeah, that's back because everything just ignores engagement now. They'll pause for a few seconds, then go right for your back end. Eh, I can't see how BG was a mess when the AI would just mindlessly attack whoever was closest. It wasn't hard to get your fighters to hold off the melee enemies.

It's true, I haven't played much since 2.0. I know defender got nerfed, but aside from that what's the difference?

Or will dudes in armor just act as MMO-style meatshields again, while the glass cannons kill off the enemies?

Looks like I'll have to go through the game with an evil character again so I can slaughter any SJW characters I can find.

Slicken is level 1, and it used to be way more OP since it lingered for some time.

4) Not great for a min-maxer, but if they made perfect, god-like companions, not only would it be unrealistic roleplay wise, but it would make your player character look bad. Say your character was a rogue. You'd want your rogue to be better than the companion rogue, yes? Why not? Developers weren't afraid to do this before. Edwin was a better mage than the PC could ever be, and good luck getting Sarevok's stats without half an hour of re-rolling. And he had more health than legaly possible, too.

The fighter doesn't need that much buffing tbh. I'm running a 2h fighter right now and he's doing fine. He's already got high deflection, health, and accuracy score, so the base is solid. He just needs a few more interesting abilities, like pre-nerf defender, armored grace, and confident aim. Add disengagement bonuses to defender and remove the deflection penalty, add some kind of offensive modal for dps fighters, maybe beef up the specilization talents, like add +10% hit to crit for specilization and another 10% for mastery. Overall it's a solid class, it just needs some extra oomph.

The stats/talents are fixable with the IE mod, but I don't know what to do about that ****ty armor.

Carnage is great for triggering all those on-hit weapon abilities. My barb was one-shotting groups of undead thanks to Carnage + St. Ydwen's Redeemer.

Well, I just finished a playthrough with a Barbarian in 2.0 and it's still great. Perception helps a lot since it somewhat fixed the problem with the Barbarian's average accuracy. I don't think you need much Con, if at all, since Barbarians have the most Endurance of any class, and they're not really built for tanking. I dumped Res, and pumped Might, Dex, Int, and Per. At level 13 (well before I got into Twin Elms) my barb had dealt 200 000 damage. For comparison Eder had only dealth about 24 000 points of damage at that point.

You're severely underestimating Carnage. Right now my Barbarian is level 13 and has dealt 200 000 damage throughout the game. That's more than anyone else in my party by far, the closest is Eder with 24 000. Barbarian with high might, dex, int, and per is an absolute monster.

Again, I beat the dragon (hard or normal, don't remember which), without using scrolls or paralyze. It's a tough fight, but I gave everyone beast-slaying weapons, had a max party, consistently tanked it so that my party was attacking the side, saved Pallegina's rez spell for Durance alone, dominated the adds so the dragon killed them first, ate a lot of food, and used a lot of healing potions. I can't say anything about potd, but besides the opening breath salvo (watching your party wipe sucks), he can just be straightup ground to death in a slugfest. I didn't even get scalebreaker (because I wasn't using metaknowledge). Yeah, sure. You can kite the hell out of him but it seems like such a massive chore. Most players will just go for the scrolls. Eh, maybe if you're a D&D veteran or something. When I played BG for the first time and wound up facing Firkraag at level 9-10 I **** my pants. Took me an ungodly amount of time to kill that bastard.

And a fighter can't survive keeping 5 enemies that would be a threat to the rest of the party on themself. Nor is their much point to doing so, unless you literally only have a single frontliner. It's not just about surviving, but it's about controlling the enemy and locking them in place. Locking that many enemies it places is great for me since I like to use a lot of AoE CC spells. Meh, enemies post 2.0 have a nack for disengaging and making a beeline for your spellcasters. Then they'll eat a nasty disengagement attack. Unlike other people, I actually try to get a healthy balance of deflection and accuracy on my tanks so they can actually hit people. As for my spell casters, considering I always build them as non squishy melee/spell caster hybrids anyway, they're never that far from the front lines anyway. Yeah, they'll eat a whooping 20 dmg. That'll teach 'em.

I only ran into one dwarf dialog option and it was for boreal dwarves.

The problem with the Adra Dragon is that you have to spam paralize and maelstrom scrolls the entire fight since there's just no way you can really go toe to toe with it like you could in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. The Alpine Dragon isn't that hard, it's just the annoying minions you have to dispatch first.

And a fighter can't survive keeping 5 enemies that would be a threat to the rest of the party on themself. Nor is their much point to doing so, unless you literally only have a single frontliner. It's not just about surviving, but it's about controlling the enemy and locking them in place. Locking that many enemies it places is great for me since I like to use a lot of AoE CC spells. Meh, enemies post 2.0 have a nack for disengaging and making a beeline for your spellcasters.

Dude, there's a master staircase.

The Sky Dragon wasn't very tough. The Adra Dragon's AoE is bull****, though. There's no way anyone can stand infront of that thing.

Defender was that sexy thing. Maybe it was a little too powerful and needed to be toned down, but a -5 to deflection is ridiculous. Make it + 5 and another +5 from Wary Defender and it'll be more useful than Cautious Attack without being unbalanced.

DPS fighters were always viable, and the deflection nerf hasn't made them any better. It's just made tanky fighters worse. I agree somewhat. The nerf to Defender was too harsh.

I beat him after a few tries. The spirits and ice blights that spawn around your party are the real problem, the dragon itself is not so hard.

Me too. Things like that + the deflection nerf make non-tank fighters far more viable now.

So DPS fighters can walk around with medium armor and no recovery penalty? Nice. Even full plate would be only 18 % now, that's pretty strong. Maybe even too strong, but OTOH, if they didn't make them stack it would make Armored Grace a pointless ability.

They don't cost anything and the uprages are pretty good IMO. A fighter with Armored Grace and heavy armor enhanced with DS will have 32% reduction in the speed penalty. Additionally, upgrading the weapon improves its speed by 15%, and upgrading a shied also improves the single weapon's speed by 15%. They give other nice bonuses, too. +chance to crit on wepons and convert crits to hit on armor. You can't upgrade soulbound weapons with them, though.

I'm kinda disappointed with the Devil. I like her personality, but her stats are so awful I can't play with her.